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Twitter announces it will sponsor the Apache Software Foundation to promote open source

Twitter loves open source. In fact, its engineers are known to be heavy consumers and producers of open source technology, and the team has already managed to release a lot of its own work into the community, including Bootstrap, a toolkit for kickstarting CSS for websites and apps and Cassie: A Scala client for Cassandra.

Now, Twitter’s really making a commitment to the movement, becoming an official sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). For those that don’t know, ASF is a non-profit foundation that provides organizational, legal, and financial support for a broad range of open source software projects.

As Twitter’s own Chris Aniszczyk notes, Twitter needs the ASF to thrive because it depends so much on Apache projects like Mesos. According to Aniszczyk, “Mesos runs on hundreds of production machines [within Twitter] and makes it easier to execute clustered jobs that do everything from running services to handling our analytics workload.”

Sponsoring the ASF is not only the right thing to do, it will help us sustain our existing projects at the ASF by supporting the foundation’s infrastructure. We have a long history of contributing to Apache projects, including not only Mesos, but also Cassandra, Hadoop, Mahout, Pig and more. As Twitter grows, we look to further our commitment to the success of the ASF and other open source organizations.

Starting today, we are sponsoring The Apache Foundation. We look forward to contributing more and increasing our commitment to @TheASF